Crypto Today: Altcoins are mooning, Bitcoin stays in a range

Here's what you need to know on 

Markets:

BTC/USD is currently trading at $9,393 (+1.1% on a day-to-day basis). The coin has been range-bound with a short-term bearish bias.

The ETH/USD pair is currently trading at $191.0 (+4.55% on a day-to-day basis). The Ethereum retreated from the intraday high of $195.35; now, it is moving within a short-term bearish trend amid decreasing volatility. 

XRP/USD settled at $0.2533 after a spike to $0.2605 on Sunday. The coin has gained over 5.7% in recent 24 hours.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, the best of the day are ICON (ICX) $0.3257 (+22.5%), Seele (SEELE) $0.0868 (+22.00%) and IOTA (MIOTA) $0.3370 (+12.23%), The day's losers are, Molecular Future (MOF) $1.13 (-15.84%), BitShares (BTS) $0.0312 (-10.8%) and Status (KSNTD) $0.0138 (-7.8%).

Chart of the day:

IOT/USD, 4-hour chart

Market:

Ripple's XRP has been one of the best-performing coins on Sunday despite the news that the payment network unlocked another 500 million tokens from the escrow account. The Whale Alert service confirmed that a single transaction of worth about $120 million from Ripple's escrow account was registered on February 1. This is a regular token release procedure that happens on the first day of each month. The money is used to finance the rewards for market makers and development goals. The company is often criticized for having an autonomous control of the newly-released tokens and a high degree of centralization. Some industry players even accused the company of earning money by dumping its tokens onto retail traders. 

Industry:

Twitter has created an official Bitcoin emoji, which appears each time a user adds Bitcoin hashtag (#bitcoin). The cryptocurrency community is enthusiastic about this news as it may help to make digital currency more popular and recognizable in the social network. Notably, companies usually have to pay million dollars to have a branded hashtag on Twitter; however, Bitcoin's was made for free, according to an Indian Telegram-channel owner Shalini. 

It took the security experts of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken only 15 minutes to hack  Trezor’s flagship hardware wallets, the Trezor One and Model T. According to the press-release, Kraken Security Labs found a way to extract seeds from the cryptocurrency hardware wallets manufactured by the industry leader Trezor. They also explained in detail how they did it, and what were the vulnerabilities that allowed them to breach the security. 

The attack takes advantage of inherent flaws within the microcontroller used in the Trezor wallets. This, unfortunately, means that it is difficult for the Trezor team to do anything about this vulnerability without a hardware redesign. 

Regulation:

Cryptocurrency industry participants do not believe that the US Securities and Exchange Commission will approve Bitcoin ETF in 2020, according to the recent survey conducted by the Block. The experts found out that nearly 78% of the respondents have no illusions about the regulator making a U-turn in the approach to Bitcoin as a financial instrument. 

The SEC is concerned with the fake trading volumes reported by the vast majority of cryptocurrency exchanges. This factor was cited as one of the major reasons behind the rejection of the Bitwise Asset Management application for Bitcoin ETF.

The regulator explained in a letter:

“Without data to show the lead-lag relationship between prices on the two sets of platforms or any evidence about the directionality of the lead-lag relationship — which might indicate that changes in prices on platforms with fake volume are or are not leading to changes in prices on the ‘real’ platforms — the Commission has no basis on which to conclude that prices on the ‘real’ platforms are insulated from prices in the rest of the market,” the SEC said in its letter.

Quote of the day:

#bitcoin is building stuff that actually meet people's needs (there's a real lack of good stores of value in the world)

Jimmy Song, Bitcoin Educator, Developer and Entrepreneur.

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